Pictured above is the new DeskPi Super4C installed in an 8U mini rack. The Super4C is a 4-node Raspberry Pi CM5 cluster board that solves two pain points I had with the older Super6C . I was testing this board around the same time I helped kick off the SBCC 2026 , the Single Board Cluster Competition for students. A dozen or so university teams squared off to run the best mini HPC cluster with a budget of $6,000, and a couple days to benchmark six HPC workloads . Pictured above is t...

Here are some things that happened on the first of May: I published this post . Thank you. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-05-01. Here are some things that happened on the first of May: I published this post . Thank you. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-05-01. Here are some things that happened on the first of May: I published this post . I published this post . this post Thank you. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-05-01. Ruben Schade

India’s Jamnagar refinery, via Wikipedia . Though wind and solar continue to carve out larger and larger shares of world energy supply, the modern world still runs on petroleum, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The world consumes over 100 million barrels of oil a day. As of 2023, oil was responsible for 30% of all energy use worldwide, higher than any other energy source (though its share has been gradually falling). In chemical manufacturing, petroleum is even mor...

Top left: The Chandrayaan 3 rover rolling out of the lander’s ramp during pre-launch testing; Bottom left: The co-added spectrum from all 23 lunar surface soil and rock measurements by the rover’s X-ray spectrometer; Right: An artist’s concept of our Moon shortly after its formation, with a magma ocean and a newly forming rocky crust. Images: ISRO / Santosh Vadawale, et al. / NASA Goddard How Chandrayaan 3 contributed insights on our Moon’s origin and evolution Results from Cha...

I just released LLM 0.32a0 , an alpha release of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for accessing LLMs, with some consequential changes that I've been working towards for quite a while. Previous versions of LLM modeled the world in terms of prompts and responses. Send the model a text prompt, get back a text response. import llm model = llm . get_model ( "gpt-5.5" ) response = model . prompt ( "Capital of France?" ) print ( response . text ()) This made sense when I start...

Chris Parsons has updated his guide on using AI to code . This is his third update, what I like about it is that he gives a lot of concrete information about how he uses AI, with sufficient detail that we can learn from him. His advice also resonates with the better advice I’ve seen out there, so the article makes a good overview of the state of using AI for software development. I wrote the previous version of this post in March 2025, updated it once in August, and it has been linked ...

“The Road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, and I must follow, if I can.” ― The Lord of the Rings Milford Sound is not only the most famous tourist spot in New Zealand, but also one of the world's top travel destinations, attracting up to 1 million visitors per year. It's often referred to as the 8th World Wonder. With such a reputation, my expectations were high. Despite its name, Milford Sound is actually a fjord rather th...

I used to have this thought that optimizations in compilers and databases were a bit of a bandaid to badly-written code or something. I think this is not a correct mental model, though. I've also been trying to learn more about compilers recently, just because I have query planning problems that I feel like must have already been solved by the compiler world. So here's some musing. Languages like Rust benefit from compiler optimizations much more aggressively than other low-ish-level languag...

The United States added 178,000 jobs in March 2026 alone, with the unemployment rate holding at 4.3 percent — a labor market that, by any historical measure, remains close to full employment. This article pulls together the latest verified figures on how many Americans work, where they work, how long they work, and how those numbers are likely to shift by 2030. Employment in the United States: Key Statistics for 2026 Total nonfarm payroll employment reached approximately 159 mi...

I don’t think I will need my jacket. The weather is warm enough that I can go outside without one. It always feels both special and jarring on the first days of the year when the world is so warm that you can go out without a jacket – the anticipation for the warmth clashes with the “what if?” There is no definite day after which it is t-shirt weather; Nature goes at her own pace. Shortly after going outside, I knew I had made the right choice. I would have had to carry my jacket should...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Hyde Stevenson, whose blog can be found at lazybea.rs . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Hyde Stevenson is a nickname I've been using onl...

The financial industry understands itself to be an arm of the government. We were inducted into this service other-than-willingly through the ordinary operation of law and regulation. This is uncontroversial and unsurprising to insiders. A claim which will be more surprising: some regulated financial institutions have delegated authority for account- and transaction-level decisioning to a non-profit. Another: that non-profit includes a private intelligence agency, which runs covert assets, publi...

NEW DELHI (April 30, 2026) – Shield AI announced today the opening of an office in New Delhi to support its growing partnership and advance work with the Indian Ministry of Defence and its industry ecosystem. The latest milestone deepens the company’s long-term commitment to India. The opening was announced during a high-level visit to New Delhi by the president and co-founder of the company, Ryan Tseng, and a member of the company’s Defense Advisory Board, retired U.S. Navy Admiral John C...

The Build Awesome (11ty) Kickstarter (Final_FINAL_v2) is live! We’re trying to make it easier for anyone to build, publish, and maintain web sites! You have until May 28 to back the Kickstarter! Go directly to the Kickstarter . Read more on the Blog . The Build Awesome (11ty) Kickstarter (Final_FINAL_v2) is live! We’re trying to make it easier for anyone to build, publish, and maintain web sites! You have until May 28 to back the Kickstarter! Go ...

My favorite quote about networking came from Jim Kurose. The Internet works so well because it doesn't have to. The IP and lower layers of the internet stack make no promises of delivery. Complete failure fulfills the protocol. This allows for simpler and more powerful protocols without the extra complexity needed to guarantee success. TCP aims for delivery basically by restarting the IP communication when it fails, and even TCP can report failure to the layers above. We can say the same a...

Respect your users and their confidence in you, “Microsoft” GitHub. Ethkuil , Updates to your GitHub Feed #65343 After years of waffling around I finally bit the bullet and migrated away from GitHub onto Codeberg and a private Forgejo instance. If Codeberg is good enough for Gentoo then it’s good enough for me. What’s the problem with GitHub? One part of my GitHub aversion is me being anti the big American tech corporations for ideological reasons. I’d lik...

I was recently reading The Long Ride Home by Nathan Millward and at one point in the book he talks about having to get on a plane, and his fear of flying: This was something I would have loved to have avoided [getting on a plane], my fear of flying (I think) born out of the absence of control you have up there. Everything in the hands of someone else, just sit there, hoping nothing bad happens because if it does I couldn't imagine anything worse than in that moment of free-fall thinking ...

No, rising house prices are not the driver of sharp fertility declines. The evidence shows only modest, mixed effects that cannot explain the large drops observed in places like Canada. What the Research Actually Shows: A well-known study by Dettling and Kearney (2014) found that rising house prices have opposing effects: they slightly increase fertility among homeowners (via a “home equity” or wealth effect) and slightly decrease it among renters (via a price effect). At average U.S. ho...

A bit of a streamlined edition, this month. Lots of interesting links still, but less commentary. You can put that down to me prevaricating on getting my previous blog about Materialized Tables in Apache Flink finished, and leaving myself little time to work on this one :) Not including the detailed narration actually knocks a bunch of time off the preparation—I’d be interested in your feedback as to how much the absence of narration impacts (if at all) your enjoyment of reading it. Let me...

In February 1637, a single bulb of the Semper Augustus tulip sold in Amsterdam for the price of a house on a canal. If you had bought one of those bulbs in November 1636 and sold it in January 1637, you would have tripled your money. If you held it until March, you were ruined. Tulip mania is the most entertaining entry in the catalog of financial bubbles because it involves flowers. But the mechanics are identical to what happened in 1720 with South Sea Company shares, in the 1840s with Briti...

The rise of coding agents has made it easy for a single engineer to spend thousands of dollars a day in LLM tokens. This is a new class of expense, and it will change the future cost structure of software engineering. We are between stable equilibria today in SWE: the old one, of needing humans to drive any code change, and a yet-to-be-established new one, where AI agents write most code. Taking as a premise that AI agents will write a large fraction of code in the new equilibrium, we will nee...

This week the article Wasm is not quite a stack machine has been making the rounds and has caught my eye. The post claims that WASM is not a pure stack machine because it has locals and is missing some stack manipulation operations like dup and swap . While I don't necessarily disagree, IMHO it's a bit of a semantic discussion because - to the best of my knowledge - there is no formal definition of what is a stack machine. Wikipedia, for example, says: [...], a stack machine is a com...

GitHub was not the first home of my Open Source software. SourceForge was . Before GitHub, I had my own Trac installation. I had Subversion repositories, tickets, tarballs, and documentation on infrastructure I controlled. Later I moved projects to Bitbucket, back when Bitbucket still felt like a serious alternative place for Open Source projects, especially for people who were not all-in on Git yet. And then, eventually, GitHub became the place, and I moved all of it there. It is hard...